Our Wisconsin Heritage

Several years ago, I may have had a hand in what we'll call the "creative redecoration" of a handful of signs leading into a small town in Wisconsin. No, this is not that story. I've got to wait a little longer to make sure the statute of limitations puts me in the clear on that outrageous little stunt.

However, the next time I'm feeling that mischievous, I've got an idea in mind. Wisconsin needs a sign on our southern border, something that makes all the northbound flatlanders on a Friday afternoon shift in their seats and look at each other uncomfortably. Something along the lines of, "Wisconsin: Come for our beer, brats, cheese and football, stay for our serial killers!"

"Live like you mean it" eat your friggin' heart out!

There have been some creepy bastards that have gone on epic reigns of terror in this state, but everybody knows that Plainfield's Ed Gein wins the title of "bull goose loony" without a fight. The guy was the inspiration for an Alfred Hitchcock movie, for frig's sake!

My appreciation of the morbid, the macabre, the absurd and the profoundly irreverent is well-documented, so when I got word that there are some filmmakers from Appleton working on a project called "Ed Gein: The Musical," I probably got a little more excited that would be considered healthy. The potential for hilarity is almost endless.

But watching the trailer they've released with a co-worker, we couldn't help but squirm. I understand the filmmakers are striving to be "historically accurate," but without some element of more blatant farce, I can't see sitting through an entire feature-length presentation of this. It's just... uncomfortable!

Here's the trailer. Judge for yourself.

Fruits of Our Labor

After several delays, we've finally put together a master cut of our rookie piece for Wis-Kino's 48 hour film kabaret last March. It seems like a lot of blood, sweat and tears for a five minute piece to end up on Youtube, but damn was it fun! Enjoy!

And We're Back!

An old pop-punk band once sang, "It's good to be bad if it's better than bored." I think that's a fair assessment of the situation, but as I've grown up, I often find myself substituting "busy" for "bad." Either way, it's better than boredom, a condition I have not suffered from since moving to Madison.

Misbehavior and activity both are easy to overindulge in, but this past week, activity took a clear first place in my list of priorities. I can tell by the bags under my eyes, the week-old pile of unfolded clean clothes in the living room and the dirty dishes stacked next to the sink. And, far from being bored, I was red-lining like an overstrained engine for much of the week, but it didn't feel half bad.

And I got to get back into the filmmaking groove for a weekend!

Come to think of it, I was reminded a lot of college, and a little surprised at how easily I fell back into the ol' triple-the-caffeine-regimen-and-grind-on-through mentality. But buzzing around like a hummingbird of some kind took its toll on my blog entry total for the month, and I apologize for that. I assure you there's plenty to talk about, and I'll try and catch up as best as I can.

For starters, my buddy Griff just got back from serving his country for 15 months in Iraq (and not his first tour either) and I was stuck in a city council meeting the night of Saint Patrick's Day. Sure, they're two seemingly unrelated factoids, but the chance to welcome an old buddy home in style and a need to do something Irish prompted us to road trip it down to Chicago to see Flogging Molly at the House of Blues.

It was my third or fourth time seeing the band live, but I was still blown away by their energy and talent. And it was damn good to have Griff home.

Tuesday's city council meeting went off without a hitch, even if I was a bit tired out from staying out until four in the morning, and then some of the best people in Madison treated me to a fantastic Wednesday night on the town in celebration of the earth's 24th trip around the sun since the day of my birth. I tried (and failed at) sleeping off my hangover before work on Thursday, then braved a County Board meeting with a wicked headache. And then there was Friday.

I've always been a distant admirer of Wis-Kino. It's a local collaborative of Madison film makers, and I went to a few screenings in its heyday, but never really dug in with any gusto. My mistake, but following an unpleasant taste left in our mouths by a brush with the Wisconsin Film Festival, some colleagues and I were aching for a means of cleansing our palates. Lucky for us, Wis-Kino's 48-hour film Kabaret was right around the corner.

The idea? Assemble a team, report for duty, receive the "secret ingredient" and build a film around it in less than 48 hours. There are no trophies, no best actor awards, no flowery speeches -- just those who run themselves into the ground trying to make their five minute film and those who don't. Anyone who knows Tim, Aaron and I knows we don't do projects halfway, so the weeked rapidly turned into an exhaustion race to see who could kill themselves the fastest.

We put together a good crew of people and got our assigned secret ingredient -- "bailout" -- and then we got right to work. Here's a timeline of the weekend from my perspective, and because it's getting late and I need to catch up on a little more sleep.

7:00 PM -- The primer screening begins at Hilldale. 48 hours from now, our final project will be due. Aaron drinks a lot of whiskey.

9:00 PM -- The crew rallies at a handy nearby location where we finalize our assignments for the weekend. Then we begin one of my favorite processes, writing by committee. In two hours we have a concept tied together by a string of potential gags.

11:00 PM -- A few crew members head home as we get into the nitty-gritty of script-writing. Half a dozen of us sit down at computers and begin writing individual scripts.

11:30 PM -- Draft deadline: We get back together, none of us with a complete script, and take turns reading what we have. Kilgore insists on placing a joke about fatties in the film. The rest of the committee insists it would be wasted air in a five minute film.

2:00 AM -- We have outlined a script. Tim carries two pages of scribbled notes and six different scripts covered in cross-outs and circled text back to his apartment and sits down to hash out the final draft. The rest of us hit the sack by 3 AM.

4:21 AM -- An email arrives in my and Aaron's inboxes. The subject header is "script." There is no text in the email and no attachment. I am fast asleep and don't notice. Tim may be so tired he can't properly send an email attachment, but he has nonetheless completed the final draft of our script.

8:15 AM -- I am up and consuming coffee at a prodigious rate. I call Tim to make sure he's bringing extra copies of the script, as we will not be able to print any.

9:00 AM -- Cast and crew rendezvous at the Lindsay, Stone and Briggs ad agency, our primary locale. We set up base camp and start work on the costumes and props we will need. Our prop, costume and grip master Ellie quickly becomes my new hero.

9:30 AM -- I meet Steffen, our cinematographer, for the first time. He also becomes my hero. I take him through the script, then walk with him through each of the areas we will be shooting in and discuss shots.

10:30 AM -- Scene by scene, I start pulling our cast to run lines. For a five minute film, there's a lot of damn memorization in this flick.

11:30 AM -- I remember that I, too, have lines I need to memorize. This comes as a great shock to me, as I have not acted in some time and worse, we're supposed to start shooting at noon.

1:00 PM -- We start shooting. It wasn't learning my lines that slowed us down, but obtaining a makeshift camera dolly that had disappeared somewhere in Madison.

3:00 PM -- We begin rolling film on the fire escape scene. This is somewhat treacherous, and I am alternately convinced that Jeff is going to fall to his death or Erica is going to keel over from heart palpitations. None of this influences me when we push through the entire scene without pausing for a break. We are chasing daylight, goddamnit.

3:05 PM -- Crowds alternately gather and then break up below us, watching the drama unfolding high above them over and over again. Jeff's lunatic giggling and Tim's attempts as a "police officer" to talk him down are apparently fairly convincing. One high schooler shouts up to us between takes she almost dialed 911. I was two steps ahead of her and called Lt. David McCaw at the Madison Police Department at 2:30 to let him know what we were up to.

5:30 PM -- We wrap the treacherous fire escape scene after Aaron nearly kills Erica by reaching out to grab a flying piece of bailout check and Erica thinks he's going to jump. I decide I'm never going hiking with Erica.

6:00 PM -- We wrap the last of our outdoor shots on the ground. The cast and crew are getting crabby -- low blood sugar. We take 60 and get some good eats nearby. It's the first non-bagel food I have had all day.

7:30 PM -- Aaron puts on a fresh pot of coffee, we shake off the exhaustion and get back to cracking. We shoot the last group scene and dismiss some extras, then shoot the one-on-ones. Cast members start dropping like flies as they're dismissed.

12:00 AM -- We start rolling on our last scene at a different locale, the vending machines at Midwest Family Broadcasting. The infamous line, "Salsitas, NICE!" is born in a moment of divine improvisation. We wrap and roll.

2:30 AM -- Sleep.

8:30 AM -- Consciousness hits like a baseball bat... Coffee, shower, Lindsay Stone and Briggs.

9:30 AM -- Aaron and I get cutting at his office after he picks up the captured video from Steffen. We don't quite have the coverage we want for the conference room, but we can make it work.

10:00 AM -- Strutt shows up, and we have a 15 minute sit-down as I take him through the script and explain what we will need for a score.

10:15 AM -- Strutt leaves LSB for his house on the south side, where he will compose the film's score.

12:23 PM -- Somehow, there's an email from Strutt with a link to eight distinctive pieces of scoring for moments in the film... I am in awe of this man for about the twenty-third time in my life.

1:36 PM -- Timmy calls, then joins us in the editing studio. It seems surreal to be editing frantically with them on something that's not "Your Signs." I deal with it.

3:04 PM -- Erica calls... I tell her it's going to be tight. We're worried.

3:40 PM -- Kilgore texts me for the third or fourth time that afternoon, antsy to see progress. He tries to bribe me with ice cream. I cave in.

4:00 PM -- Kilgore shows up without ice cream. We let him see our progress, then send him off for ice cream.

4:30 PM -- A lot more non-editors have started hanging around the studio, which has some nerves on edge, but it seems like we're going to make it now.

5:00 PM -- We have a rough cut that runs 5:20. We need to get it under 5:00.

5:20 PM -- Our cut now runs 5:04. I say it's close e-damn-nough. Timmy throws a line back at me from a year and a half ago when we were working on the Christmas Special sequel: "We've gotten it this close, let's cut it all the way down."

5:30 PM -- We start our rendering process. A power outage or hard drive failure now will ruin our lives, but none seem forthcoming.

6:00 PM -- I am laying on the hard floor breathing deeply, listening to the computer click. I hate rendering.

6:05 PM -- Our render is complete. Aaron starts burning the project to a DVD.

6:20 PM -- We have two DVDs with the screening-cut of Monsieur Maintenance on them. I tell Aaron he is to submit the second copy if I am killed in a fiery accident en route to Hilldale.

6:45 PM -- I am not killed en route to Hilldale, but submit the film to the guy at the door, count the number of entrants above me on the list, then pump my fists into the air and proudly declare, "Third Place!" He looks at me like I don't get it. I look at him like he doesn't get it. We were probably both right.

So all in all, a trying but rewarding experience. My favorites of the night were Rob Matsushita's "Extremed," starring the fabulous Emily Mills, and Josh Klessig's Ethology. The Decider did a write-up on the Kabaret which is definitely worth a read. Those itching to see the final cut of Monsieur Maintenance can check back here in a week. Tim, Aaron and I agreed we want to tack about ten seconds back onto the film and clean it up, and then we'll be posting it on Youtube.

And it sounds like we'll be rallying the same crew to participate in the July Kabaret. Steffen, Ellie, Jeff, Kilgore, Erica, Katie, Adam and Branton were just too good not to work with again.

Now I'm going to sleep, damnit!

Final Push

I know this has not been the most interesting month in terms of my limited blog entries, but the month of November has been FAR too interesting for me. With the holiday this week and a December 1 deadline bearing down for our submission to the Wisconsin Film Fest, I just wanted to make it clear that I haven't abandoned this blog, I haven't stopped responding to emails and I haven't fallen off the face of the planet.

I'm just concentrating every fiber of my being on an amped up work schedule, the final push to polish this project we've been working on for three (or four, I can't even remember any more) years and keeping myself in semi-healthy, functional non-homicidal order.

I've pushed a lot of side projects... well... even further to the side this past month to concentrate on Your Signs. Tim, the project's mastermind, and Aaron, our editor, have let it consume their lives, but it's looking and sounding better than I could ever have imagined it would prior to the editing process. We're all looking forward to having them back in the real world.

So I'm going to disappear from the blogosphere for the next week. There's no hope I as a producer and sound designer can match the effort they've put in at this point, but I'm going to do everything I can to support them in this, their hour of need. You can follow sporadic progress updates from Tim on his Myspace page. The blog posts are clearly a little harried and caffeine fueled, but then again, so is Tim these days.

Also, I'll leave you with an exerpt from the column I wrote when I worked for the paper. Know that it would make my life about eighteen times simpler to skip Thanksgiving with the family this year, but it's time that I value too much. I'll skimp on sleep instead.

From: http://portagedailyregister.com/news/local/25ed7637-11b7-55bb-8638-b224477c4d20.html

Giving Thanks For Great Cooks in the Family

A lot of my peers, both college undergraduates and recent graduates, dread this time of year.

For students, Thanksgiving serves as that lonely island of complacency shining hopefully between the pre-turkey midterm rush and the last push toward finals in December. Many recent graduates, on the other hand, approach the family-oriented holiday apprehensive of the uncomfortable questioning they surely will have to face at the dinner table: "Who do you like in the presidential race?" and "When are you going to get a job?" and "What, exactly, did you major in?"

That's not me, however, and not just because I'm already gainfully employed. I love Thanksgiving, and I love being with my family on Thanksgiving.

Now here's where your typical holiday newspaper column would delve into a hot chocolate-fueled tug-at-your-heartstrings soliloquy about how the holiday season brings out feelings of gratitude, puts life in perspective and helps people appreciate the good things they have. But I'm going to be perfectly frank.

I come for the food, and it just so happens that the family I give thanks with every Thanksgiving is comprised, largely, of kitchen prodigies.

My parents agreed to host my dad's side of the family for Thanksgiving this year, but I will be trekking up north to visit my mom's parents tonight and Sunday. Not only does that make me a good grandson, but it means I'll have sampled the culinary prowess of both sides of the family this Thanksgiving weekend.

Now my aptly-named Grandma Cook is 81 years old, and I told her when I asked to come visit this weekend that I did not want to be a bother and would be insisting on taking her and Grandpa out to eat at some point. But I have a feeling I could show up at their house completely unannounced and she would greet me with a plate of cookies.

I don't know how she does it, but it's like she's magic, and all I can do is bask in her wizardry. Luckily, the Weis side of the family is similarly gifted.

Thanksgiving with the Weises is a process that begins weeks in advance of the Thanksgiving holiday itself. My mom spearheads the whole project, working with all the organizational aptitude of a four-star general to coordinate the movement of vast quantities of mashed potatoes, string beans and gravy to arrive in a precise, timely formation on the dining room table.

Mom prepares a good deal of the oh-so-vital side dishes herself, including loaves of her infamous cranberry bread. The cranberry bread is so deeply and emotionally equated with the holidays in my mind that I check Mom's oven before I check the calendar to see if it's Thanksgiving or Christmas.

My dad and grandpa, on the other hand, lead the charge on Thanksgiving's most crucial front, the preparation of the bird. As a child, I watched them baste turkeys, I watched them grill turkeys, I watched them roast and glaze and fry turkeys, and the results have been stunning each time.

But the remarkable part is that they manage to prepare the turkey so masterfully solely in the intervals between quarters of Thanksgiving Day football. It's a skill I can only hope is inherently genetic.

And then there is Grandma Weis, my very own matron saint of flaky baked goods. This loving woman has, for 22 years, spoiled me and ruined me with her pies, to the point that someday, if I find a woman to marry, it will be with the caveat that I never will be able to say in all honesty her baking is "the best I've ever had."

Grandma Weis rolls out her full arsenal of pies for Thanksgiving Day, but the no-brainer response for which to choose has always been her apple pie. It is, in a word, "aaaawwwwgh."

"Aaaawwwwgh," by the way, is pronounced properly by letting your head loll, rolling your eyes back into your head and drooling copiously.

So yes, I went into Thanksgiving Day after a brief day-long fast with the express intent of gorging myself silly on platefuls of amazing food until I'm flat on my back in the dining room, groaning as the beagle licks food off my face. It's a plan that allows little time for rumination, and it's not until the day after Thanksgiving that I really have a chance to weigh what's important about the holiday.

Still giddy from the tryptophan, I can be honestly grateful for the good things in life. I really am blessed, in that I have a loving, supportive, healthy family I get to spend time with.

And every last one of them can cook up a storm.

Last Chance to Shine

This entry in my blog details the most aggravating day of the fall, followed by the most extravagant.

Saturday:

First of all, I ought to be shot.

Saturday very well could have been the last beautiful day we'll have in Southern Wisconsin for six months for all I knew, and certainly the most beautiful day we've had in almost a month. Villain that I am, I took a young man in his prime and made him spend the body of it sitting in a closet lined with blankets, with all sound from the outside world drowned out in headphones as he stared at a small screen that showed him snippets of the same video clips over and over and over and over.

Had I been Eric Plantenberg on Saturday, I would have shot me. As it was, I wanted to shoot me anyway for keeping myself inside all day, and I wasn't the one stuck in a closet. But this guy troopered it out, and he deserves mad respect.

Eric's the leading man in The Big Film We've Been Working On, and with a fine cut pieced together, it's my job to fix the dialogue that didn't take the first time around. For that, there's the highly repetitive process known as ADR, which we sort of managed to pull off at my house.

Basically, lacking any budget at all, I took a little utility closet in my one bedroom flat and lined it with blankets to reduce noise bleed and echo. I ran a microphone from the closet into my digital recorder, and a computer monitor in from my laptop. Somehow, I managed to find room in the closet for Eric and a chair, set up some speakers to output from the digital recorder, and we were able to roll tape.

I was really happy with the final product we had. The audio is as clean as if we'd recorded in a full-fledged recording studio...so clean, in fact, we'll probably have to muddy it up some so it doesn't stand out from the rest of the audio when we dump it into the mix.

But I must have counted down, "3-2-1," I estimate, somewhere on the order of a thousand times. We bagged 138 lines, at an average of 7-8 takes a line, and it took us a good six or seven hours to finish it. I was happy with how productive we were, but nursing a hangover and sleep deprived as I was, I was mostly just a crotchety bastard by the end of the day.

Sunday:

Contrast Saturday, cooped up inside with a grudge against the world, against Sunday, and it's like I had a bipolar weekend. As a rule, I'm convinced there's something magical about the last day before winter sets in, and I'll usually go out of my way to spend it outdoors if I have a hunch the end is near.

My buddy Kyle and I gassed up the bikes (read: motorcycles) Sunday and headed southwest into Green, Iowa and Lafayette Counties. If you've never been into this part of the state before, know this: there's nothing there, save a few small towns and the rolling hills and valleys of the driftless region, marred only by the snaking ribbon of Highway 151.

View Larger Map

For the sake of scenery, we avoided main roads like 151, choosing instead to improvise a route along the more rural roads. Let's face it: they're more peaceful, they're prettier and they're a lot more fun to ride. Leaning into turns, climbing, banking, falling, weaving, it's probably the closest I can ever get to being a fighter pilot with my political views, my conscience and our nation's political climate.

We chose Darlington because Kyle said he had a friend, Silas, whose family had a farm down there. He said we were invited to drop in, take a look around and maybe grab a bite to eat. I have some rural roots myself, and I never shy away from the chance to get a bit of shit on my boots.

Turns out, the family had a "farm" there, and a gorgeous one at that. Silas's parents are very well-established in the Darlington community. His mother is the Lafayette County District Attorney, and his father is part owner of Lafayette County's Memorial Hospital. While the "farm" did have livestock and crops, this was no plant-the-proceeds operation struggling to get by. It was an estate, a rural paradise, and we were welcomed with open arms and a healthy dollop of small town hospitality.

Silas's mother greeted us in the kitchen, clad in denim bib overalls and a red bandana. As she cooked (we offered to help prepare the meal, but she said everything we could have helped with had already been done), she told us the household had been living off its own produce for the past couple of months. For the basics, they still had to rely on the grocery store in town, but the only thing in the meal we ate that hadn't been raised on their land was the rice and the spices.

The meal itself was divine. Silas fried up a hamsteak the size of a boogey board, then divied it up on a serving plate. Another friend of his, an Indian grad student, whipped up some authentic curry that I could have eaten by the pound had it not been for the polite company. Some rice, fresh greens and home-bottled sparkling water topped off the setting.

As we were carrying plates out to the picnic table, the phone rang. With a glance at the caller ID, Silas's mom shrugged off the phone call. "It's about the campaign," she said nonchalantly, referring to her own bid for re-election as DA. Clearly, this was a family that feels the way I do about the last day before winter sets in.

Silas's Dad, an MD, "came in from the fields" for dinner as well. He had been out working doing some trenching on the land. After dinner, the young twenty-something contingent of our troupe walked the back pasture, looked at the cattle, hiked down along a crick and scoped out a four-ton oak that had blown down in a wind storm and needs to be removed. When I left, I was heartily able to say I was pleased to have made their acquaintance.

The day began with next to no expectations. By the time I put the bike in the shed for the night, I had ridden 150 miles through gorgeous autumn countryside, met some good honest hard-working people and fallen in love, again, with the state I've grown up in.

Now, as winter closes in, I'll find new reasons to despise it, but I'll never really be able to hate living in Wisconsin. I think that's part of the beauty that is life here. The lows are pretty damn miserable, as last winter's record snowfall will exhibit, but they only serve to elevate the already dizzying highs... higher.

I miss summer already.